Clerics Try To Calm Iraqis Amid Killing

Attacks Leave 25 Dead, Incite Anger Between Religious Sects

BAGHDAD — Clerics on both sides of Iraq's Sunni-Shiite divide scrambled to calm believers on the Muslim holy day Friday amid ongoing violence that left at least 25 more people dead.

Eleven people were killed in a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Tuz Khurmatu. Three laborers were gunned down while waiting for jobs in the capital and a Shiite cleric was assassinated in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. The U.S. military said a Marine also had been killed Thursday in an explosion near Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Sunni Arabs filled the ranks of Saddam Hussein's security and government apparatus. Mainly Sunni insurgents now are waging a guerrilla campaign against U.S.-led forces, the country's interim government and the ascendant Shiite majority.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who claims to lead al-Qaida's affiliate in Iraq, has claimed responsibility for some of the worst violence. He declared war this week on Shiites in retaliation for a joint Iraqi and American offensive on the northern city of Tal Afar.

The declaration so shocked Iraqis that even the Muslim Scholars Association, an organization of hard-line Sunni clerics with alleged ties to the insurgency, demanded in a statement issued Friday that al-Zarqawi "retract these threats" because they hurt the Sunni Arab cause.

"It harms the image of jihad, obstructs the success of the resistance in Iraq and leads to more innocent Iraqi bloodshed," said the statement.

Iraq's Shiites have grown increasingly angry about violence directed at them. But in Najaf, Friday prayer leader Sadr Din Qubanichi of the Imam Ali shrine, the most revered holy site in Iraq, asked followers to turn the other cheek.

"Submitting to one's passion and confusion will bring us to domestic sedition and eventually lead us to failure," Qubanichi, a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, told worshipers. "We must go forward, be patient and carry on building the new Iraq."

The suicide car bomb in Tuz Khurmatu, 150 miles north of Baghdad in an agricultural area populated by Kurds and Turkomen as well as Shiite and Sunni Arabs, exploded as worshipers began streaming out of the Rasoul Adham mosque.

In addition to the dead, at least 20 people were injured.

Iraqi Army Capt. Hussein Mahmoud said later that authorities arrested a man near the mosque "from a neighboring country" with an explosives belt strapped to his waist.

In the capital, Sheikh Fadhil Lami, a preacher of the Ali Mosque in Sadr City, was gunned down as he drove his car to a gas station.

In Baghdad's ethnically and religiously mixed Jadida neighborhood, witnesses and police said masked gunmen in three cars opened fire on a group of mostly Shiite day laborers, killing at least three and injuring 12. It was the second assault in less than a week on men waiting outside for jobs. On Wednesday, at least 112 laborers were killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad.

"The driver was shouting, `God is great! Shoot them!'" said Ali Salaam Salman, a security guard who witnessed the Friday attack.

But Iraqis who participate in the current Shiite-dominated government are also targets.

Gunmen on Thursday assassinated the mayor of the Sunni Arab city of Qaim in western Anbar province after barging into his home and killing four of his guards, a police official said on Friday.

In Baghdad, a car bomb at a checkpoint killed three Iraqi police officers and gunmen killed two Ministry of Transportation employees, police said.

Iraq's sectarian divide zigzags across the social terrain.

Most of Iraq's major tribes include Sunni and Shiite branches. Iraq's Kurds and Turkoman minorities include Shiites and Sunnis. Sunnis and Shiites often intermarry, their children inheriting the father's sect.

Iraqis dread the prospect of a civil war and often blame outsiders for stirring up tensions.

"We are living as brothers, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites and other religions," Sunni Sheikh Mahmoud Sumaydai told worshipers Friday at the Um Qura mosque. "This country contained us for years. Why has it become too small to contain us now?"

Still, Sunnis and Shiites have starkly divergent views on fundamental political issues. While most Sunnis abhor the draft constitution scheduled for a nationwide referendum next month, Shiites strongly support it and the weak central government it would establish as a way of putting an end to Saddam Hussein's era.

While Shiites view recent U.S. and Iraqi military operations in Tal Afar and western Iraq as great successes against the insurgency, some Sunnis call them acts of sectarian cleansing.